Haunted
by Phantahelix
Summary: Oneshot: A nightmare rattles the Weasley house on August 31, 1992. It's Molly's job to comfort little Ginny Weasley, who is already feeling the effects of her new diary full of secrets.


**Disclaimer:** I don't own it.

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Molly Weasley had been dreaming about one of those Muggle contraptions when she woke up next to her violently snoring husband. Oh, what had it been? An engine, she thought. One that powered the Muggle cars. It was squarish and squattish, with lots of pipes and smoke issuing from its tail end, and it looked for all the world like an angry, puffed up clockwork toad. And it made the worst noise, just like Arthur snoring…and.

Why was she awake again? Then the warm hand on her shoulder jiggled her softly again and she remembered. Someone was talking at her. Mum, Mum, Mum. She remembered waking her mother in the exact way. How ignorant she had been.

"Mum? I said Ginny's shouting in her sleep. Woke me up, it was so loud."

Molly squinted through the dark to the shifting shadow outline of one of her sons, name to still be determined. She sat with a groan, and, pulling the bedsheets around her shoulders, patted at her beside table until her roaming fingertips met the familiar wood of her wand.

"Lumos." A small shaft of light burst from her wand tip, but failed to sweep away the cobwebs of darkness in the corners of the room. It fell upon a scrunched and freckled face, tousled red hair and maroon striped pajamas.

"You always were the light sleeper of the family, George."

"Eugh! I'm Fred! And you could have at least warned me before you turned on the light, Mum. I'll probably never see again."

"Oh! Sorry, Fred dear." Beside her, Arthur turned over in bed, still very much asleep, but maybe not for long. "Come along, we better patch this up before anyone else wakes up. We all need our rest for carrying luggage on the platform tomorrow."

They picked their way across the floor, careful to avoid every creaking board on the way to the door. Out in the hall there was a draft; Molly hugged her thin flannel nightgown closer and mounted the stairway after Fred. His pajama bottoms dragged under his heels, and holes were wearing into the dust-grimy fabric. Oh, she would have to hem those eventually. It seemed Fred and George had stopped growing already. Ron, on the other hand…she shuddered to think of all the clothes he would grow out of in the next few years.

"Fred," Molly said with a tinge of suspicion. "I don't hear anything up there." With the illuminated tip of her wand she pointed to the landing, just by the entrance to Ginny's room. "You and your brother aren't trying to pull the wool over my eyes, are you? Because I am perfectly able to send a howler on the first-"

A soft moan punctuated the air. "Mmmphg, muhh- No…"

"It goes in cycles," Fred said. "She starts out quiet like this, but then it gets louder and…well, you'll see." He jammed his fingers through his hair, and it stood on end, giving him the look of a sleep-deprived cockatoo.

"Please! No!" The sound of rustling sheets puttered into the hall.

"How long has this been going on?" She stood outside her daughter's door, hand resting on the knob.

Fred shrugged and scratched vaguely at an ear. His eyes were halfway shut. "Maybe an hour. I would have got you sooner, but I thought maybe…" He frowned, and a sleepy pain crept into the posture of his lips. "Maybe it would just go _away_. But, she just kept at it."

It disturbed Molly that her son had been up listening to this for an extended period of time, but even greater was her worry for her distressed daughter.

"Go on to bed, Fred dear. I'll take care of this. And don't tell your brother's about this. Ginny would be mortified."

"S'fine, I'll just tell Harry then."

"Fred." Even in the wee hours of the morning, her tone could straighten him out. He nodded in acquiescence before turning tail to shuffle to his own room across the way. Molly waited for the boy's door to click shut before she turned the handle to enter Ginny Weasley's bedroom, from which there was emanating a string of mournful pleas.

"No, I don't want- please!" The first Molly saw of her daughter was a milky white arm swinging out from the blankets, flailing across the bed and knocking a stack of school books from the bedside table. They fell with a clatter that would have roused Percy from his slumber a floor below, if the boy hadn't been completely exhausted from helping his father deal with the flying car incident. Fearful that the books may have been damaged, Molly hurried to crouch and pick them up. Second-hand or not, they still cost a pretty penny at Flourish and Blotts. Potions, Transfiguration, Defense; Molly went through a mental checklist of all the Hogwarts courses as she restacked her daughter's things. And then, when she thought all was accounted for, Molly noticed the dark corner of yet another book just barely poking out from under Ginny's bed. Curious. Molly didn't remember buying this one.

It was a small leathery thing, filled with pearly blank pages. It was a diary, Molly realized; a young girl's best friend. No doubt Ginny had scrounged it from some junk box in the house, hoping to record her first year at Hogwarts. Molly smiled and stacked it under some other books, so Ginny wouldn't know someone else had found it. What a shame it would have been if the girl had forgotten it at home.

"Stop! You can't!" Ginny's forehead was knotted with fretful wrinkles.

"Nox." Molly's wand flickered to darkness and she sat down at her daughter's side, softly stroking the girl's hair. "Wake up, Ginny. It's only a bad dream. Wake up now." But instead of having a soothing effect, her mother's touch sent Ginny twisting wildly in her blankets, cringing away from the contact.

"DON'T TOUCH ME!" Ginny's hair whipped through the air as she sat upright like a coiled spring, and breath ripped into her lungs. Her eyes burst open, and for one terrifying moment, all Molly could see was black. No white, no golden brown. The eyes of a deep sea monster.

But no, that was a trick of the darkness, because her little girl's eyes were just fine, and her small arms clung to her mother's neck, and there was a moment or two of tearless sobbing.

"There, there, baby. You're safe."

"Oh, Mummy, I had the worst dream," Ginny snuffled. Molly would never admit it, but she cherished these sorts of moments, when her children were babies again and she was Mummy again.

"Tell me about it if that would make you feel better." She began to rock back and forth, in her head humming an old, nearly-forgotten lullaby. Something about dragons and soup.

Then the moment was over, because Ginny was straightening up and brushing her wild hair back from her temples. She linked her thin fingers together. "Well it started out nice enough. I was walking around the pond at Aunt Muriel's house, when suddenly I fall in, but it isn't water, it's tar or something. I'm about to drown, and you're there, and Percy and Fred'n'George too. And Ron and Harry, and everyone really. And you are all standing at the edge watching me. Then hands come up out of the muck and they drag me down and I'm in this stone hallway and I- and…" Ginny's eyelids fluttered. For a moment, Molly thought the child was going to be sick, but the moment passed just as quickly as it came.

"And I don't remember what happens after that." Ginny said it very slowly, like she was relearning how to talk, or maybe her mouth was unwilling to say what it was saying.

"Well," Molly broke the silence that fell after the abrupt end of the dream. "It sounds to me like you're just nervous about tomorrow. It's not every day that a young witch starts her first day at Hogwarts."

"S'going on in here?" Arthur stood in the doorway, with his rumpled pajamas and glasses askew on his nose, very much like the first day she met him in the Gryffindor common room. "I heard noises and you weren't in bed.

"Ginny's just had a bad dream, that's all." Molly straightened the pillows and sheets that had been ruffled in the process of comforting, picked up her wand and stood. "I think it's all cleared up now, isn't it Gin?" Both Arthur and Molly turned to their daughter for agreement, and she nodded tersely.

"I…" Like a little ball resting on the nose of a seal, Ginny tottered between two ways of falling. "I'll be fine. Got to get back to sleep. Hogwarts...It's only a few hours away." She smiled genuinely. "I've been waiting for tomorrow for my whole life!"

"That's the spirit." Arthur nodded. "It it's gonna be great, Ginny my peach. You'll learn so much that your head will swell to twice its original size."

"That's sounds wonderful," Ginny smirked, settling back into her blankets. "Definitely something to look forward to."

"Well, we better be off to bed, too." Molly took Arthur's hand. "_Sweet_ dreams this time, Ginny."

"Yes, Mum." The door closed softly behind them.

Arthur turned to her at once. "Is that something I need to worry about, Mollywobbles?"

Oh, that man; so caring. "No darling, not at all.

"I don't recall her having nightmares very often. What if-"

"Hush, Arthur. It's nothing to get excited about. She's just nervous, poor thing…."

They walked, hand in hand down the staircase in the dark.

"She's right as rain."


End file.
